The Temple and the Scrolls

The HIRAM KEY

The GNOSIS interview with
Christopher Knight

By Richard Smoley

Few areas of thought invite the same
fascination and controversy as alternative history. In recent
generations more and more such accounts have seen print: Immanuel
Velikovsky claimed that the earth had collided with comets in
recorded history; Erich wn Daniken insists that an- cient cultures
encountered extraterrestrials; Graham Hancock says the pyramids of
both the Old and New Worlds are relics of a civilization that
thrived 10,000 years before Christ.

ln this tradition stand Christopher Knight
and Robert Lomas whose new book The Hiram Key (published by Element
Books) traces a long and elaborate thread between the Old Kingdom of
Egypt and the Freemasonry of today.

The story is an intricate one. According to
Knight and Lomas, the fundamental principle of Egyptian religion was
Ma’at a word connoting levelness order and symmetry; later it came
to mean up-rightness in the moral sense—an ideal they say that was
part of the Egyptian legacy to Freemasonry.

Moreover the Pharaohs of the Old and Middle
Kingdoms were initiated using rites that were believed literally to
transform the monarch into the embodiment of the god Horus. During a
period of social breakdown between 1780 and 1560 B.C. some usurpers
tried to steal this esoteric knowledge from the young Pharaoh
Seqenenre Tao II.

Seqenenre did not give up his knowledge so
thc upstarts killed him. This claim Knight and Lomas is the
source of the legend of Hiram Abfi. To back up their claim they
point to Seqenenre’s mummy which displays the same wounds to the
head that Hiram suffered according to the Masonic rites.

Seqenenre carried his secrets to the grave
with him but the Egyptian priests used the story of his martyrdom as
part of a reformulated ritual. This knowledge say Knight and Lomas
was handed down through the Essene community and the Jerusalem
Church the earliest Christian organization.

Before the Jerusalem Church perished in the
Jewish War of 66-73 A.D., it in turn managed to hide its knowledge
in some scrolls buried under the site of the Temple. In 1118, the
Knights Templars, digging there, found the scolls which provided
them with the knowledge that underlay their own secret rites.

In 1307 the Catholic Church turned against
the Templars. Templar refugees then catried their tradition and
their scrolls with them to Scotland whose king Robert the Bruce was
struggling to maintain in-dependence from England and who was also
under excommunication from Rome. Here the Templars found a congenial
home and helped Robert turn the tide against the English invasion.
By the time the excommunication of Scotland was lifted in 1328 the
Templars had managed to conceal themselves entirely from the prying
eyes of ecclesiastics.

One strange building a few miles south of
Edinburgh provides a key to the Templars’ fate. This is Rosslyn
Chapel built between 1441 and 1486. Knight and Lomas consider it to
be the missing link between Templarism and Frcemasonry pointing to
carvings that they say clearly depict Masonic initiations. (They
also say that because some Templars fled across the Atlantic to the
New World establishing a surreptirous trade with Scotland Rosslyn
contains likenesses of the New World plants maize and aloes— carved
a generation before Columbus’s voyages.) Knight and Lomas believe
the Templar scrolls may be buried under Rosslyn and they’re trying
to organize an archaeological dig to see if they are right.

Knight, an advertising executive in Sheffield
England says he became curious about this alternative view of
history after he underwent Masonic initiations and wondered what lay
behind them. (One of the most interesting parts of The Hiram Key is
in fact the authors first-hand descriptions of the first three
degrees of thc Masonic initiations.) I interviewed him in February
1997 during his stopover in San Fransisco on a book tour.

Are Knight and Lomas right? Critics have
stressed the specula-tive nature of much of their work and there is
some truth to their charges. Personally I find the accounts of the
link between the Templars and the Freemasons the most convincing
parts of Knight’s and Lomas’s picture. But as with most works in
this genre even if I don’t entireIy accept its conclusions, The
Hiram Key still serves to remind me that history is not always what
the professors and the textbooks claim.

Richart Smoley: To begin with, how does your view
of Masonic history differ from the official view?

Christopher Knight: The United Grand Lodge of
England prefers to talk about the evolution from medieval
stonemasons, from an operative Masonry into a speculative Masonry.
But it sounds extremely improbable that a group of nobles, kings,
and lords suddenly turned up at the masons building churches and
said,”Hey, good fellows, do you mind if we use your tools and
ceremonies for our own betterment?” It seems particularly odd if you
start looking, because there were no organized stonemasons’ guilds
in England and Scotland, though there were plenty of them in France.

Smoley: And then there is Rosslyn Chapd in
Scotland, which dates to the fifteenth century.You said in the book
that it’s not a Christian chapel; it comes between the Templars and
the Freemasons.

Knight: It’s the link between the two, which has
been spotted archaeologically before, because the stonework has got
obvious Templar and Masonic connections. Since we completed the
book, we actually found in the building a carving of a person being
initiated into the first degree of Freemasonry by a Templar, which
we hadn’t spotted before [see illustration on page 26].We were with
an officer of the United Grand Lodge of England, who is also a
scholar up in Cambridge. His jaw hit the deck when he saw it,
because it categorically proved that in 1440 they were conducting
the rituals that we know today, with the cable tow, the noose, and
the blindfolded candidate holding the volume of sacred law in his
left hand; his feet were exactly in the form they had to be. The
noose was held by a man in a Templar tunic with a Templar beard.

Smoley: So that is a solid connecting link.

Knight: Absolutely, literally rock-solid.
Freemasonry was a Scottish event, if you like. It was brought to
England by James Vl of Scotland, when he became James I of England
in 1603.There would have certainly been other connections earlier,
but none that really brought it forcefully, because James was a
Freemason.

Smoley: Is there any connection between
Freemasonry and the other medieval orders, such as the Knights
Hospitallers?

Knight: Definitely not.The Knights Hospitallers
were the sworn enemy of the Knights Templars. From our research, we
are quite clear that the Knights Templars found buried scrolls in
Jerusalem that were put there prior to the destruction of the Temple
in 70 A.D. And they adopted the rituals and the teachings contained
in those scrolls. And they kept the scrolls and took them to
Scotland; therefore they alone had access to this knowledge.
Possession of it would have been sufficient to have them destroyed
as heretics, which of course ultimately they were. So they didn’t
share that with anybody. Just being a medieval

order doesn’t mean that you are in any way
connected to these pieces of ancient knowl-edge; you’re not. There’s
only one source.

Smoley: How did an order of warriors become
transformed into an order of builders?

Knight: The Knights Templar became famous as
sponsors of builders throughout all of Europe, if that’s what you’re
referring to: Chartres Cathedral, all of the most splen-did medieval
buildings, were theirs. And they built their splendid round churches
as well. They started a wave of building; the finest buildings
of the last 2000 years are certainly Templar. That came about
because after the First Crusade, the Templars camped on the ruins of
Herod’s Temple and spent nine years digging there. Miraculously
those nine knights at the end of those nine years be-came
phenomenally rich; they became a holy order that answered only to
the pope.

It was said of them that they had secret rituals
and did strange things. They very quickly became the first
international bankers, lending money to kings; they got into a
position of great power. And they took in people from all countries
as members, and they had their Grand Masters in each European
country. So they rapidly got into large-scale building. Their
purpose was to reconstruct Ezekiel’s vision of the new Jerusalem;
the spires all across Christendom were Ezekiel’s vision for
Jerusalem.

Smoley: Do you see any connections between the
Christian and the Muslim or Sufi orders of the time?

Knight: No. I can’t count it out; it’s something
we looked at and we found we didn’t need; we used an Occam’s razor
principle: “Don’t invent complicated scenarios when simple ones will
do.” It seemed very unlikely to us that this very large body of
knowledge that they acquired would have come verbally from anybody,
because it would have been dangerous for some-one to walk up to
these Christian knights and suggest these strange ideas to them.
I think they were fairly self-contained. But the teachings
they found were of what we would now call the Jerusalem Church,
whose beliefs were rather different from what most people imagine.

Smoley: When you say the Jerusalem Church, do you
mean the organization headed by James, the brother of Jesus?

Knight: Yes, latterly headed by him, formed
initially by John the Baptist. And that was the first cast, if you
like, as opposed to the people that wrote the New Testament, who
were the second cast. Remember—though the New Testament somehow
misses mentioning it—that between 66 and 72-73 A.D. virtually all of
the Jerusalem Church were wiped out, along with most of the
population of Judea. So there was no one left that knew the real
story. But the real story was written down, because they were
prolific writers. It’s known that there was an original Gospel, from
which these Romanized Jews that called them-selves Christians tried
to interpret events.

Smoley: How does this in turn link back to the
Egyptian mysteries? You trace these back to King Seqenenre Tao. How
does one go from the Second Temple of Jerusalem back to these
Egyptians?

Knight: The Dead Sea Scrolls, now that they are
fully available, indicate, as we have been arguing, that the Jews of
first-century Jerusalem owed a great deal of their theology to
Thebes. This makes perfect sense, if you think about it,
because a thousand years before, everything David and Solomon did
was Egyptianesque. Their whole culture was taken, we are told, out
of Egypt by Moses and the people that had lived there for
generations. The Ark of the Covenant would have looked as though it
had come out of a pyramid; the angels would have been Egyptian.

In the time of the Babylonian Captivity,
Ezekiel berates the leaders of Jerusalem who have been taken away by
Nebuchadnezzar. He says, ”lt’s no wonder Yahweh’s letting all of
this happen to us. We’re just not worthy of it. Look at the Temple.”
He has visions of going back to the Temple and see-ing Egyptian
things in it; every-thing’s Egyptian. He’s saying, “Let’s have our
own culture.” And they tried to turn things around into their own
culture, instead of being in the shadow of Thebes. That’s where I
think they started resetting the old legends into a Jewish con-text.

Smoley: Perhaps you could discuss a little bit
about the earliest things you treat in your books—the esoteric
knowledge that was available in Egypt up to 1700 B.C.

Knight: We started to look at Egypt originally in
order to try and re-construct the mind-set of the Jews of
first-century Jerusalem; we’d gone back as far as we could go to the
first writ-ings in Sumer in southern Iraq so to re-construct things
forward to get inside their heads. This led us to Egypt. The
nation came into existence 5200 years ago or thereabouts, with the
unifi-cation of the north and the south, Upper and Lower Egypt.
Before that time we only have some general comments from Egyp-tian
records, which talk of the time when the gods mixed with men. But
the strange thing is the gods have their own grave-yards. The gods
don’t seem too much different from men, so what made them gods we
don’t know.

But as the Egyptian kingdom found
its feet after some 700 years, we believe they built the Pyramids,
which were obviously a tremendous feat of engineering. By that
time they had crystallized their theology pretty well, this
philosophy of Ma’at, doing good for good’s sake, and likening it to
the squareness and uprightness of the building of the temple, which
is the same teaching that is found in Freemasonry. We tried to
find out what their secret rituals were, particularly the making of
a king. The rituals of the actual crowning were well known, but the
actual event of making a man a god was missing. We tried to piece
that together using our awareness of what happens in Masonic ritual,
and with some new thinking that’s going on with people like Robert
Bauval in inter-preting the Pyramids.

The Egyptians clearly believed that the new king
traveled to the Land of the Dead with Osiris his father, there to be
crowned by the old gods of Egypt. He traveled all through the night,
to the valley of the shad-

ow of death, with all its dangers, but he was

guarded by his own father. He was gen-

uinely dead. And then he returned the next

morning as the morning star, the light that

shone in through the shaft of the Pyramid,

which was aligned to the morning star.

Now we’re not actually for a moment

suggesting that that’s what happened, but

that’s what they believed happened. Proba-

bly with the aid of drugs, they would have

a comatose king who was then brought

round the morning afterwards. Obviously

we know how very important the stars

were to them, and these ceremonies could

only be conducted at certain times.

The origins of these beliefs we cannot

know, because they go past prehistory in

Egypt, but they appear to be very ancient

indeed. But in 1753 B.C., when Seqenenre

Tao was killed, the details of those secrets

were lost, and something had to be sub-

stituted. And because this young king was

so brave, they actually used his death as

part of that ritual thereafter.

Smoley: I’ve seen a newspaper article that

says King Tut was murdered; the back of

his head was smashed in.* So what your

book says about Seqenenre Tao is not in-

nately implausible. But what meaning does

this ritual have for us today? Does it have

a symbolic importance for our own inner

development?

Knight: I think not. The Egyptians had

gone into decline at that point, and they

had to have something to continue their

principle of Ma’at, of doing good to all

people. They succeeded; they burst into

the New Kingdom, and things got pretty

good again. But I think there is not a lot

for us in that today, apart from its interest
as an antiquity.

What is actually is important is how

that myth was built up. Prior to starting

this, I think it’s fair to say that Robert

and I were not esoterically orien-

tated. A lot of things that we now

firmly believe we wouldn’t have be-

lieved before, because we had a hard

edge between those things that are

pragmatic, scientific, and real, and

things that are too feely and touchy.

We’ve completely lost those edges

now, because they don’t exist. There

are huge truths within these fuzzy

edges.

In the end it’s always about peo-

ple, and what people make of things.

The Jerusalem Church, with Jesus

and James—they were not “beau-

tiful people”; they were hard-nosed.

Their attitudes and actions were not

soft, but they are a massively im-

portant part of human history that

changed everything.

Smoley: Can you talk a little about

the very intricate topic of the different

lines of Masonry? Can you help someone

sort out the Blue Lodge, the Scottish Rite,

and so on?

Knight: Freemasonry is very big in the

United States; there are over 2.5 million

Freemasons, and naturally it has evolved,

as Christianity has, into all sorts of forms,
some recognized, some not recognized, by the United Grand Lodge of
England.

What you call the Blue Lodges over

here—which isn’t a term that we use—

is basic Freemasonry, which consists of the

first three degrees, plus the Holy Royal

Arch Degree, the fourth degree, if you like.

So there is the Entered Apprentice, then the

Fellow Craft degree, then the Master

Mason. That third degree is the all-im-

portant one that makes a man a Master

Mason.The continuation of that is said to

be the Holy Royal Arch degree, which is

not historically accurate, I would claim.

And that is all that is recognized by the

United Grand Lodge of England.

The 33 degrees of the Scottish Rite

are actually the originals. They are very

important, but they have been so changed,

replaced, muddled, that it’s hard to recog-

nize many of them. Many of those degrees

are now given to people without the ben-

efit of any ritual. And even if they read

about the ritual, which they can do, they’re

not the original rituals; they were emend-

ed. There are plenty of degrees, and then

there are other split-offs, particularly in
the Christian degrees whlch are also invented and don’t have a
lineage.

Now the Knights Templar degree is very
popular, and there are two forms of Knights Templars.

There are Masonic Knights Templars, and

there is a modern organization of Knights

Templars that is not connected with

Freemasonry. Certainly the Masonic order

was an invention to pick up on the Knights

Templars. The non-Masonic Knights Tem-

plars I think claim a lineage, but I would

need a lot of persuasion personally to see

how that could be.

Of course there are other fraternal or-

gamzations like the Odd Fellows, who have

their own heritage, but none of them, I

think, predating Freemasonry.

Smoley: One criticism I’ve heard of your

book is that it contains a lot of specula-

tion, that it relies heavily on “could bes.”

How do you respond to such criticism?

Knight: Well, we said from the start that

we would be shot down by people who

would pick us off with small arrows. Be-

cause we’ve covered so much ground, we’re

bound to have errors in there, as well as

things that will subsequently turn out to

be incorrect.

We started off on a personal note; we didn’t
do it for the benefit of anybody else.

We started off with a blank piece of paper,

and we put lots of speculation down. And

each of those bits of speculation hardened

up, as new evidence came into play.

The fact is that everything fits togeth-

er. As one expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls

said,”lt’s all about joining up dots, but I

haven’t seen them joined up better. I can’t

say you’re right, but you seem more right

than anyone to date.” Which we’ll settle

for.

You can take the odd brick out of our

wall and argue about it, but the wall’s still

damn well there. There are some things in

the book that remain speculative but don’t

affect the main thesis. They’re in there be-

cause they seem reasonably probable and

are worth putting into people’s minds.

There are some things we kept out be-

cause they didn’t seem to get past that
crit-ical point of probability, although we’d have liked to put them
in.

Our next book is due out in the U.K.

by April and in the U.S. hopefully by the

end of the year. In that we have got con-

crete proof for some of the things that were

speculative in this book. Because we did-

n’t set off with any point of view, we’re

free to discard anything; we’re not precious

about any single part of it. We’ve thrown

away lots of theories, and we’ll continue

to do so. But in the next book we come

out with some evidence that supports some

of the speculative bits.

Smoley: There seems to be a great thirst

for material like your book, Holy Blood,

Holy Grail, and Graham Hancock’s books.

One thing all of these have in common is

the sense that the real history is something

quite different from conventional views.

Why are people so hungry for this kind of

thing today?

Knight: Those books were not ones that

I’d have read by choice before. But I’ve

met Michael Baigent now and we’ve fre-

quently talked with Graham Hancock and

Robert Bauval, because our work is over-

lapping.There’s no doubt that history such

as we believe it to be from schoolbooks is

hopelessly inadequate.

The thirst for this sort of alternative

history comes from the fact that so much

new information has become available in

this latter half of the twentieth century.

And the old ideas of the nineteenth cen-

tury, which is really when history got so-

lidified, are shown to be completely false.

They were written by people who had a

very egocentric view of the world, and

they saw everything in little boxes, where-

as in fact it’s constantly in flux

There was also an idea that human his-

tory is an upward slide, where everything

we get tomorrow is going to be better than

we’ve got today; next year’s car is going to

be better than last year’s car.We have an

arrogance of the moment, which is utter-

ly false. Human history is up and down

with peaks and troughs, and without the

shadow of a doubt there have been parts

of the past where we’ve been a lot smarter

than we are now and lost it—perhaps not

in terms of technology, that’s only one mea-

sure, but in other ways.

One critic wrote about this sort of

book,”Why does everyone want to read

this sort of esoteric history instead of the

proper history?” But it’s not esoteric, be-

cause there isn’t anything in the book that

isn’t more practical and more down-to-

earth than the assumed histories. For ex-

ample, why is America called America? It’s

got nothing to do with Amerigo
Vespucci.That’s a mlstake. The guy that made the mistake tried to
retract it.

That’s had a huge response from
varlous aca-demics who say,”That’s got to be right.”

It came from the Mandaeans in southern

Iraq, who said they left Jerusalem around

33 A.D. when Saul was conducting his

purges against the Jewish sect that we call

the Jerusalem Church. They ran off to

southern Iraq, and they still are there
today, if Saddam Hussein hasn’t wiped them out.

They still conduct the same rituals and cer-

emonies that they did then. They’re sort

of a living fossil, and they have stories of

Jesus and John the Baptist, and speak of

Jesus betraying secrets.

The Mandaeans also talk of the star

called “Merika ‘ which was always known

of. It sounds like an Egyptian word, Meri-

ka, and this was actually Venus in its west-

ern setting. They said this star across the

great ocean to the west marks a land be-

neath it where everything is wonderful and

perfect.

It’s possible—this is very speculative,

but it’s possible—that the Mandaeans be-

came aware of this from the ancient Egyp-

tians, who traded, it now seems, with the

Americas. Cocaine and tobacco have been

found in the mummies, so they did know

about this continent; for sure people have

always been coming to America. Maybe

the idea was to head for Venus as the mark-

er, to head west. And by the time the Jews

had it, it was a mythical idea, though it

may have been real once.

This was written down in the
scrolls that were found by the Knights Templars.

On the morning when they were arrest-

ed on October 13,1307, a substantial Tem-

plar fleet slipped away from La Rochelle

harbor. Some, we believe, went to Scot-

land, some slipped down to Portugal to re-

plenish their stocks, and knowing Europe

was no place for them anymore, they did

the only thing they could do and sailed

due west straight from the top of Portu-

gal and landed in the New World in the

early weeks of 1308. And Rosslyn Chapel,

as many people are aware, contains exclu-

sively American plants carved into it in

1440. And it’s a Templar building, so it

looks like they continued the trading. So

that’s where the name America came from.

They were French, so they would have

called it “La Merika.”The “A” would have

come in there.

Smoley: What impact has Freemasonry

had on British history? How has it shaped

the culture?

Knight: It’s interesting, because Scotland

has been a very different country from

England. Scotland and northern England

and Wales were Celtic.They had an inde-

pendent church. They didn’t believe that

Jesus was a god; he was a prophet. And

they kept that, even though they were com-

pelled to give in to the power in Rome at

the Synod of Whitby in 665. But they kept

that culture alive, so there’s always been a

different outook in Scotland.

So Scottand was fertile ground for these

ideas found in the Templar scrolls. And the

Templars went to Scotland when Robert

the Bruce was excommunicated. This is

where we get this commonality between

Celticness and the Templars and this Ma-

sonic behavior, all wrapped into Rosslyn.

Now part of the teachings in the scrolls

left by the Jerusalem Church was the idea

of democracy, of everyone being responsi-

ble. Jesus turned water into wine; he turned

ordinary people into something special,

which everyone said he couldn’t do.

When the English Civil War came, it

spilled over into Scotland, with Masons on

both sides. Later on, the Jacobites, the house

of Stuart, were driven out of England, and

a Hanoverian king was brought in. There-

after English Freemasonry hived itself off

and denied its Scottish roots, because it

was very unsafe to align yourself with Scot-

tish origins at that time.

Smoley: Because the Stuarts had brought

Freemasonry into England.

Knight: That’s right.They reinvented their

own history. So when the Grand Lodge of

London—as it then was—started in

1717, they were denying anything before

it, because it would have inevitably given

them Stuart, Jacobite connections. From

that point on English Freemasonry went its

own stuffy way. It repeated a lie about its

own past, changing its own history books,

denying that Christopher Wren was a

Freemason. Their own historian wrote in

1728 that he was Grand Master, but there-

after he denied it, because they didn’t want

to discuss anything prior to 1717.

Smoley: One occasionally hears about the

connection between the British royal fam-

ily and Freemasonry. What has that con-

nection been since 1717?

Knight: When the Grand Lodge estab-

lished themselves, they wrote that a prince

of royal blood should be the Grand Mas-

ter of Freemasonry. It was 70 years or so

before they actually achieved that.The first

few were just humble misters. But they did

achieve that, and the English royal family,

the Hanoverians, became members. Now

Scottish Freemasonry, Freemasonry in the

form in which it created this country, was

extremely republican. I think one of the

main reasons that the British monarchy

survived when the French and a lot of

others didn’t was that they embraced

Freemasonry.

Smoley: That leads to the question of

Continental Freemasonry. It’s obvious that

Freemasonry was as important in the uni-

fication of Italy as it was in the creation of

the United States; in France it was also

quite important, especially in anticlerical

republican movements. I’m wondering how

this all fits in with Masonic history.

Knight: We started looking at all those

and found they were not core to our the-

sis, so l can’t say we’ve delved into that in

huge detail. The numbers of Freemasons

on the Continent are very small compared

to the U.K. and obviously the U.S.There

are other Masonic-style people like the

Carbonari, who explain their own histo-

ry by saying they arrived in Italy from Scot-

land. And there are linkages, where they

use analogies to charcoal burners rather

than builders.

As far as Freemasonry in France is con-

cerned, it looks as though there was a Tem-

plar survival in Paris after the arrests in

1307. According to one document, there

was a line of Grand Masters that contin-

ued in secret. Some people dispute the au-

thenticity of this document, but from what

I’ve read serious people have thrown out

those arguments; it does appear to be gen-

uine.The French Templar line detested the

Templars that went to Scotland.They saw

them as runaways, cowards.

But there was a reunification under a

man called Chevalier Ramsay, who was

teacher to Bonnie Prince Charlie when he

was in exile. And he came up to England

and brought more Templar information

into Freemasonry and took Freemasonry

into France. Being a Scot, he is often at-

tributed with generating some of the high-

er degrees of Freemasonry, but we know

from Rosslyn that they were in existence

back in 1440.

Smoley: This also leads to the U.S. How

do you see the influence of Freemasonry

in this country?

Knight: The Freemasonry in the U.S. is,

to the best of my knowledge, far more part

of the community. There’s also the recog-

nition of women in Freemasonry here,

which has never existed in England. It has

in Scotland to a greater extent, they’re

much more relaxed. But English Freema-

sonry, particularly in London, is very stuffy

and introverted. Until 1984, they would-

n’t even respond to any comments from

the outside. They had a little ivory tower.

I think in the U.S. it’s always been a

bit more relaxed and out in the open,

which has got to be healthy, because peo-

ple are always very suspicious of something

that’s secret or widhdrawn or excludes them.

That obviously happens to some extent in

the U.S., but I think it’s better over here.

The effect of Freemasonry has been

huge. In England, virtually all of the men

that formed the Royal Society were

Freemasons, which was the beginning of

the end of the Dark Ages, and that was

built on in the U.S, which created a mer-

itocracy:”You’re as good as you’re good.”

In England, it’s still true in many ways that

you’re as good as your father was, or what

school you went to; there’s still too much

of that. Which is completely against

Freemasonry, because in any lodge your

rank in life is unimportant, and your rank

in Freemasonry counts.You can be a king

or a shoeshine boy; it doesn’t make any

difference. Rudyard Kipling’s Masonic

poems are famous for making that point.

Smoley: Then there is the perennially pop-

ular view of the Masonic conspiracy. What

stimulates these ideas? Is there any grain of
truth to them?

Knight: There is possibly a grain of truth,

it’s hard to say, but it would be a grain. It’s

a big problem in England at the moment,

with some people saying that police offi-

cers should be required to admit to being

Freemasons. Not anything else; you could

belong to the British Nazi Party, and that

would be OK. It’s all a bit upside down.

Certainly in England, which is sort of

a role model for others, there is very little

chance for conspiracy, because there’s no

central list of members. The idea that it’s

all linked together in some sort of network

is not true; it’s more likely to be true in

other areas of the community, where you

get the Jewish community looking after

themselves, or the Italian community—

or if you really want to get on, you’ll join

a golf club. When you become a Freema-

son, you certainly swear that you’re not

looking for any advantage of that kind, and

you’ll not use it for that purpose.

Now when you get a situation where a lot of
persons in power are all Freemasons, inevitably you’re going to get
conspiracy theories. But again Freemasons swear that they will not
do that, and there’s no reason to suspect that they would. If
you look at the Founding Fathers of the United States, most of them
were Freemasons. So you could say that the whole of America is a
Masonic conspiracy; it’s not always unhealthy. I think that idea is
overplayed.

Smoley: What role do you see for Masonry in the
future?

Knight: Huge, potentially. Nonexistent,
potentially, depending on how it’s played. Which is one of the main
reasons we felt we had to write this book in a readable format. When
we got to a certain point we had to decide whether we were going to
do a series of academic papers or publish it in a readable book, and
we decided we’d get more people if we did it the second way.

The importance of Freemasonry is that, like
the Egyptian Ma’at, it’s a moral code, a good system to lead your
life by. It acknowledges the good of goodness for its own sake,
outside of a religious require-ment. Yes, you have to say you
believe in a single God; that’s the only requirement. So it provides
an oasis of spirituality, if you like. And the requirement to learn
all these strange rituals is a bit like meditation: it focuses your
mind in a completely different direction from the way it is in the
cut and thrust of daily life.

The difficult thing is that it requires a
reasonable amount of time to do it well, and time is short these
days, because people are working a lot harder, and there are a lot
more calls on their leisure time; they can join sports clubs, watch
any number of TV channels, go to the theater, go to restaurants,
whereas a few hundred years ago, you’d sit by the fireside or risk
your neck going to the local pub, perhaps. So it is difficult;
fraternal organizations of all kinds are losing membership. But I
think there is an opportunity for a renaissance.

Smoley: I found one of the more interesting
sections of your book to be the descriptions of the initiations.
What effect have they had on you personally?

Knight: The third degree particularly causes you
to reflect on your own mortality and the transience of your life,
and on the bigger picture. And instantly it makes you more
thoughtful. That’s quite an effect.

Smoley: Freemasonry is well-known for its
ethical values. Do you feel that spiritu-ally it’s a vital, living
path? What can some-one get out of it today?

Knight: I think nothing like what they should get
out of it, which is why I think our re-search is so important. I
don’t say that be-cause it’s our research, but we genuinely feel
that. I think it’s of great importance to Freemasons and to
Christians and to people with some spiritual outlook in general.
Freemasonry as it’s practiced today has lost its way to a large
degree, pardy because of people’s living patterns and the way
timeshave changed, but also because it was delib-erately changed
around 1717 and again in the next century. Christian degrees were
invented, and old degrees were pushed back into the background. It’s
hard to understand, because it’s been carved up so much.We are still
continuing to piece it all back together again.